“I told you not to speak her name.”
“I know that you did, the very day after she left home. You told me to think of her as if she was dead, but she ain’t dead. She’s out there in the world somewhere, and some day she’s coming back!”
“No! No!”
“Yes, she is, and when she comes she’ll find everything ready for her. She’ll find her room just like it always was, and she’ll find me just like I always was, lovin’ her. I can’t forget what she used to be to me. I don’t care what she’s done!”
She had tried a hundred times in the last months to say this or something like this, but she had never been able to gather enough courage, and now, no matter what came of it, she was going to speak. He tried to stop her, but the great love she had in her heart was stronger than her fear of him, and she went on.
“Sometimes, Doctor, I think, because all day long, every day, I’ve been thinkin’, and sometimes it seems to me that just those last few weeks, before she went away, that she wasn’t well some way, that somehow she couldn’t help doin’ what she did. Maybe there was something that you and me don’t understand, that was too strong for her to fight. Can’t you look at it like that? Can’t you get to think of her like you would of a child that didn’t know no better?”
For a moment the doctor looked up into her flushed, earnest face, then slowly dropped his head on his arms, and leaning forward on the table he began to sob like a child.
“Oh, Doctor! Don’t! Don’t, Doctor!”
She tried to soothe him, as gently as a mother might have done, and with much the same feeling in her heart. She was not afraid of him now, but she longed to comfort him.
“Please, Doctor! Don’t! I won’t say any more. Only don’t do that. Won’t you try not to be so unhappy?”